This winter session
of Parliament, in which the opposition and the government
exhausted so much political capital over forcing and winning,
respectively, a vote on foreign direct investment (FDI) in
multi-brand retail came to a rather quiet close this week. In
the days after, as number crunchers conclude an audit — hours
lost to adjournments, volume of legislation taken up, passed,
etc — it is an opportune moment to inquire, what is it that
members of Parliament do?

Or, as a former
Labour member of Britain’s House of Commons poses it in a
collection of writing, Doing Politics, what are MPs for? Walking
through the steps of Tony Wright’s answer is instructive, not
least because it casts in clearer relief the lack of disquiet
this month over the crisis framed by the chairman of the Rajya
Sabha when he threw his hands in the air and suggested the
extreme step of rescheduling Question Hour or even abandoning it
altogether. (As an indication of the magnitude of the
abandonment already happening, according to an aggregation by
PRS Legislative Research, in the winter session till December
18, the Lok Sabha had taken up only 41 of the 360 questions
listed for oral answers, and the Rajya Sabha only 33.)

Wright’s question is
posed amidst his larger ambition to present a defence of
politics and politicians in these times when their absolutely
pivotal role in underwriting basic liberties in a democracy is
so glibly discounted. He notes that breaking down the job
description of an MP to its bare essentials — of seeing to one’s
constituents, voting in divisions, and serving on committees —
does not quite capture the nature of the task. Neither, he adds,
does a more thorough list of the functions an MP performs
tabulated by a Commons committee: such as supporting her party
in Parliament, in government or in opposition; representing
constituents individually and as a constituency; holding the
government to account by scrutinising its functioning,
challenging it and nudging it in certain direction; initiating,
scrutinising and giving final shape to legislation; shaping
policy, on the floor of the House and in committees, and
explaining her party’s position to the public.

What these
objectively tabulated criteria miss is practically every MP’s
constant activity in “campaigning to get re-elected”, in
individual and party terms. The terms of this activity are more
difficult to determine or, indeed, to appraise, but this is the
KRA that matters to most: “What MPs have in common is that they
are members of a professional political class, paid for out of
public funds to sustain the national and local political
battle.”

Within the
legislature, moreover, MPs can be divided into the “when” people
and the “why” people. The “when” people, says Wright, are
focused on moving up, into office, nearer the front benches in
allotment of seats in the House, into key parliamentary
committees. This ambition is essential to a healthy House,
because in a parliamentary system MPs are indispensable for
“providing the rather shallow pool of people from who
governments have to be chosen”.

The “why” people, on
the other hand, see their parliamentary task as demanding
answers of the executive on the reasons behind their actions and
policies. Together, the two types denote the essential balance
that nourishes a healthy democracy — between “those who think
that politics is about the exercise of power and those who think
that politics is about the control of the exercise of power”.

For those of us
watching from the outside, this is a useful reminder to
understand the inherently, and beneficially, political nature of
all engagement in Parliament and to therefore resist the
inclination to seek Parliament as an isolation chamber sanitised
of MPs’ political agendas.

The parliamentary
question is a key instrument in nurturing the “why” people. And
the increasingly casual abandonment of Question Hour by
adjournments or to business and discussion deemed to be more
urgent on the day is an indicator of its low priority for far
too many MPs. Certainly, Parliament as an institution has been
criticised these past years for different ways in which Question
Hour is undermined: by the absence of MPs who had posted
questions to be answered by the concerned minister, on occasion
by the absence of the minister himself without any notice, by
disruptions. To get the process moving, various reforms have
been attempted — in the Rajya Sabha, presence of the MP who
posted the question is no longer requisite for the minister to
carry on with giving the answer; for a while Question Hour was
rescheduled from the opening hour (11 am to noon) to later in
the afternoon on the presumption that MPs are prone to vent
concerns on the mind the moment they show up in Parliament, but
the change did little to revive Question Hour, and it was
reverted to its old time slot; there is a limit to the number of
supplementaries that can be asked on each question, so that more
of the 20 starred questions can be taken up in the allotted
hour.

Hamid Ansari’s
outburst of exasperation will hopefully focus bipartisan
attention on breathing fresh life into Question Hour. Perhaps by
spicing up the possibilities by adopting practices like Prime
Minister’s Questions. It may be just the high-stakes incremental
change that could clear space for the “why” people.